Synopsis

In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom, National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin gives us a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America.

A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts to defect with the help of a reluctant former student. All of Ha Jin's characters struggle to remain loyal to their homeland and its traditions while also exploring the freedom that life in a new country offers.

Stark, deeply moving, acutely insightful, and often strikingly humorous, A Good Fall reminds us once again of the storytelling prowess of this superb writer.

Excerpt

The Bane of the Internet

My sister Yuchin and I used to write each other letters. It took more than ten days for the mail to reach Sichuan, and usually I wrote her once a month. After Yuchin married, she was often in trouble, but I no longer thought about her every day. Five years ago her marriage began falling apart. Her husband started an affair with his female boss and sometimes came home reeling drunk. One night he beat and kicked Yuchin so hard she miscarried. At my suggestion, she filed for divorce. Afterward she lived alone and seemed content. I urged her to find another man, because she was only twenty-six, but she said she was done with men for this life. Capable and with a degree in graphic design, she has been doing well and even bought her own apartment four years ago. I sent her two thousand dollars to help her with the down payment.

Last fall she began e-mailing me. At first it was exciting to chat with her every night. We stopped writing letters. I even stopped writing to my parents, because she lives near them and can report to them. Recently she said she wanted to buy a car. I had misgivings about that, though she had already paid off her mortgage. Our hometown is small. You can cross by bicycle in half an hour; a car was not a necessity for her. It’s too expensive to keep an automobile there—the gas, the insurance, the registration, the maintenance, the toll fees cost a fortune. I told her I didn’t have a car even though I had to commute to work from Brooklyn to Flushing. But she got it into her head that she must have a car because most of her friends had cars. She wrote: “I want to let that man see how well I’m doing.” She was referring to her ex-husband. I urged her to wipe him out of her mind as if he had never existed. Indifference is the strongest contempt. For a few weeks she didn’t raise the topic again.

Then she told me that she had just passed the road test, bribing the officer with five hundred yuan in addition to the three thousand paid as the application and test fees. She e-mailed: “Sister, I must have a car. Yesterday Minmin, our little niece, came to town driving a brand-new Volkswagen. At the sight of that gorgeous machine, I felt as if a dozen awls were stabbing my heart. Everybody is doing better than me, and I don’t want to live anymore!”

I realized she didn’t simply want to impress her ex. She too had caught the national auto mania. I told her that was ridiculous, nuts. I knew she had some savings. She got a big bonus at the end of each year and freelanced at night. How had she become so vain and so unreasonable? I urged her to be rational. That was impossible, she claimed, because “everybody” drove a car in our hometown. I said she was not everybody and mustn’t follow the trend. She wouldn’t listen and asked me to remit her money as a loan. She already had a tidy sum in the bank, about eighty thousand yuan, she confessed.

Then why couldn’t she just go ahead and buy a car if that was what she wanted? She replied: “You don’t get it, sister. I cannot drive a Chinese model. If I did, people would think I am cheap and laugh at me. Japanese and German cars are too expensive for me, so I might get a Hyundai Elantra or a Ford Focus. Please lend me $10,000. I’m begging you to help me out!”

That was insane. Foreign cars are double priced in China. A Ford Taurus sells for 250,000 yuan in my home province of Sichuan, more than $30,000. I told Yuchin an automobile was just a vehicle, no need to be fancy. She must drop her vanity. Certainly I wouldn’t lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball—nothing would come back. So I said no. As it is, I’m still renting and have to save for the down payment on a small apartment somewhere in Queens. My family always assumes that I can pick up cash right and left here. No matter how hard I explain, they can’t see how awful my job at a sushi house is. I waitress ten hours a day, seven days a week. My legs are swollen when I punch out at ten p.m. I might never be able to buy an apartment at all. I’m eager to leave my job and start something of my own—a snack bar or a nail salon or a video store. I must save every penny.

For two weeks Yuchin and I argued. How I hated the e-mail exchanges! Every morning I flicked on the computer and saw a new message from her, sometimes three or four. I often thought of ignoring them, but if I did, I’d fidget at work, as if I had eaten something that had upset my stomach. If only I had pretended I’d never gotten her e-mail at the outset so that we could have continued writing letters. I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home—you could restart your life on your own terms. But the Internet has spoiled everything—my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby.

Four days ago Yuchin sent me this message: “Elder sister, since you refused to help me, I decided to act on my own. At any rate, I must have a car. Please don’t be mad at me. Here is a website you should take a look at . . .”

I was late for work, so I didn’t visit the site. For the whole day I kept wondering what she was up to, and my left eyelid twitched nonstop. She might have solicited donations. She was impulsive and could get outrageous. When I came back that night and turned on my computer, I was flabbergasted to see that she had put out an ad on a popular site. She announced: “Healthy young woman ready to offer you her organ(s) in order to buy a car. Willing to sell any part as long as I still can drive thereafter. Contact me and let us talk.” She listed her phone number and e-mail address.

I wondered if she was just bluffing. Perhaps she was. On the other hand, she was such a hothead that for a damned car she might not hesitate to sell a kidney, or a cornea, or a piece of her liver. I couldn’t help but call her names while rubbing my forehead.

I had to do something right away. Someone might take advantage of the situation and sign a contract with her. She was my only sibling—if she messed up her life, there would be nobody to care for our old parents. If I had lived near them, I might have called her bluff, but now there was no way out. I wrote her back: “All right, my idiot sister, I will lend you $10,000. Remove your ad from the website. Now!”

In a couple of minutes she returned: “Thank you! Gonna take it off right away. I know you’re the only person I can rely on in the whole world.”

I responded: “I will lend you the money I made by working my ass off. You must pay it back within two years. I have kept a hard copy of our email exchanges, so do not assume you can write off the loan.”

She came back: “Got it. Have a nice dream, sister!” She added a smile sign.

“Get out of my face!” I muttered.

If only I could shut her out of my life for a few weeks. If only I could go somewhere for some peace and quiet.

Table of Contents

The Bane of the Internet A Composer and His Parakeets The Beauty Choice Children as Enemies In the Crossfire Shame An English Professor A Pension Plan Temporary Love The House Behind a Weeping Cherry A Good Fall

Ha Jin

About Ha Jin

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of six novels, four story collections, three volumes of poetry, and a book of essays. He has received the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2014 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ha Jin lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.

Ha Jin is represented by Random House Speakers Bureau (www.rhspeakers.com).

Praise

Praise

“His best work so far. . . . Comparable to the best of Malamud and Singer.” —Kansas City Star

“[A] fine collection. . . . Jin is a master of the straightforward line . . . . [and] a significant American writer. . . . As in Chekhov's late work, his writing covers a lot of ground quickly.” —The New Republic

“Included are the rich imagery, attention to detail, and wry humor that are Jin’s stock in trade and that, when taken together, offer—as fellow writer Francine Prose has noted—‘a compelling exploration of the . . . terrain that is the human heart.’” —Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

“[Jin’s] unvarnished prose adds a no-nonsense charm to the stories. . . . He just leans on simple phrasing that could come out of Sherwood Anderson or Ernest Hemingway. . . . Jin’s approach is the more honest one, and the one more likely to endure.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Ha Jin’s new book of stories rises way above the ordinary or merely good. . . . The embarrassments and jokes and adulteries and frustrations of these characters in their little prosaic spaces convey the sense of how each human being is like and unlike all others.” —New York Post

“This may be Ha Jin’s best work yet, his stories often ascending to the mystical penumbra we expect of singer, Malamud, or O’Connor. . . . Ha Jin is equally good as a novelist and a short story writer. . . . Stories still allow him to get to the heart of the matter in a more piercing manner.” —The Huffington Post

“Jin writes with a twinkle in his eye.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“The understated clashes of culture [in A Good Fall] reveal careful thematic design and provide an almost 360-degree view of this select human experience: The concerns of people everywhere trying to make a better life come alive, one deceptively simple story at a time.” —The Miami Herald

“[Jin’s] work is shot through with a sense of isolation, melancholy and sacrifice: what it means—and costs—to be different. . . . There is a seriousness present. . . . And there is occasional humor or at least irony.” —The Seattle Times

About the Book

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, a collection of stories about Chinese immigrants by the award-winning author of Waiting and A Free Life.

About the Guide

Set in the large Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens, the 12 stories in A Good Fall explore the complicated, conflicted, stressful experiences of Chinese immigrants caught between past and future, China and America, the dream of a new life and the hard-edged reality of their present circumstances.

Many of the characters in these stories occupy a cultural and emotional transitional space, struggling to create new identities in America but not entirely free from the gravitational pull of their pasts, their families, and their homeland. For some, the distant homeland is altogether too close. The narrator of the opening story, “The Bane of the Internet,” is besieged by e-mails from her sister back in China asking for $10,000 to help her buy a car. Because of the Internet, she feels that her family might as well live nearby. In “Temporary Love,” Zuming tells Lima: “From now on I won’t date a Chinese woman again. Just sick of it—every Chinese has so much baggage of the past, too heavy for me to share and carry. I want to live freely and fearlessly with nothing to do with the past” (page 193).

The desire to live freely and fearlessly proves elusive for the immigrants in Jin’s stories. They may wish to escape the past and achieve prosperity, or at least stay out of poverty, but the promise of America is in most cases considerably more complicated than advertised. In “The Beauty,” Gina literally transforms herself through plastic surgery. She erases her past and her former identity as a homely girl from a small town, but once her deception is discovered, her husband nearly leaves her and feels justified in beginning his own deception. In “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” three young Chinese girls become prostitutes in order to survive and send money home to their families. In “A Pension Plan,” Niu makes a desperate bid for financial security, quits her job, and vows, “If I can’t speak enough English to work for a unionized company, I’ll starve and die!” (page 173). And in the collection’s masterful title story, a monk/martial arts teacher swindled out of his salary is driven to attempt suicide.

Indeed, money problems plague nearly all the characters in A Good Fall, but anxiety about money is only the external reflection of the inner struggles, the sense of exile, that afflict them. Unmoored from the customs and culture of China, many of Ha Jin’s protagonists find the stress and alienation of life in America almost unbearable. And yet these immigrants demonstrate an extraordinary resilience, a determination to solve their problems, to push through their hardships—in whatever way they can—that is truly remarkable.

And in Ha Jin’s vivid, understated, and unflinching prose, their conflicts, defeats, and successes take on a shimmering immediacy. Though confined to one city and one ethnic group, these stories illuminate many of the struggles that all immigrants must face.

About the Author

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of the internationally bestselling novel Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award, and War Trash, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize; the story collections The Bridegroom, which won the Asian American Literary Award, Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award; the novels The Crazed and In the Pond; and three books of poetry. His latest novel, A Free Life is his first novel set in the United States. He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University. War Trash, The Crazed, The Bridegroom, Waiting, In the Pond,A Free Life, and Ocean of Words are available in paperback from Vintage Books.

Discussion Guides

1. In the opening story of A Good Fall, the narrator thinks: “I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home—you could restart your life on your own terms. But the Internet has spoiled everything—my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby” (pp. 5–6). In what other stories does the theme suggested in this passage—the desire to escape the past and start a new life in America—appear?

2. What role does the setting—Flushing, Queens—play in these stories?

3. The main characters in the stories of A Good Fall are, in many ways, quite different from one another, running the gamut from an English professor to a prostitute. In what ways are they and their situations similar?

4. In “A Composer and His Parakeets,” Fanlin is composing the music for an opera in which the hero claims that “greatness in art is merely an accident.” But Fanlin cannot accept this idea and feels that “no art should be accidental” (p. 12). What accidents in the story inspire Fanlin’s own artistic creation? In what other stories do accidents play a major role?

5. What expectations do the protagonists of these stories bring to the United States? In what ways are those expectations frustrated or fulfilled?

6. How do the characters in these stories try to solve the dilemmas they find themselves in? What are some examples of their resilience and resourcefulness?

7. In “A Pension Plan,” Minna tells Niu, “I do trust you, Aunt Niu, but we’re in America now, where even the air can make people change” (p. 170). How are the main characters in these stories changed by America? How does being in American change the way they view their homeland?

8. How does America appear as seen through the eyes of the Chinese immigrants in A Good Fall? What challenges and opportunities does America present for them?

9. In “Temporary Love,” Lina’s husband essentially blackmails her into paying for his business school tuition. In what other stories are characters pressured financially or treated unfairly over money?

10. What are the pleasures of Ha Jin’s storytelling style? How does he manage to make his writing at once so simple and so engaging?

11. Short stories generally revolve around a conflict that is introduced, developed, and then either resolved or left open. What kinds of conflicts occur in the stories of A Good Fall? Which stories exhibit strong closure? Which ones are more open-ended?

12. How has Ha Jin ordered the stories in A Good Fall? Is there a clear progression? Why would he end the collection with a story in which the protagonist attempts to kill himself?

13. Much of what happens in the book is peculiar to Chinese immigrants, but what aspects of these stories might be true of the immigrant experience more generally?

14. The stories in A Good Fall are pervaded by anxiety and an often brutal struggle to survive. What moments of tenderness and compassion stand out?

15. How might these stories be received by Chinese contemplating emigration to the United States?

(For a complete list of available reading group guides, and to sign up for the Reading Group Center enewsletter, visit www.readinggroupcenter.com)